Lessons Learned from the Recession

While this long recession has many of us shaking in our shoes about the future of our jobs, our businesses, our retirement accounts, and the circulation of money in the US, it also may offer us some lessons that can help us both individually and collectively as a nation. First, the recession has taught us some lessons about risky lending practices, and opened congress’ eyes to the need for regulation of these loaning entities. It also has taught us that no one can ever time stock market, nor can they ever see a huge drop coming all the time, so it’s best to diversify your portfolio if you’re saving for retirement, into low and high risk, and medium risk investments.

It has definitely taught me and my significant others a thing or two about planning ahead and saving “for a rainy day” so to speak, in case anything ever does happen where one of us loses our job or finds that we have to start over. For example, I now try to put aside a certain amount of money every month that gets automatically deposited into another account where I don’t have access to withdraw the money. A lot of Americans have learned that you have to always have something to fall back on, in case of financial difficulties or one losing their job, and that lesson has spread amongst most of the families that I know.

Many economists think that the recession may be coming to an end, and that in the end, we as a nation may actually become a stronger economy down the road because we now know how to avoid these types of things from happening in the future, to this depth of severity. Ben Bernanke is one of those people, and he has shared his thoughts on why he felt that the bailout had to take place or else it would have meant imminent disaster for the American economy.

While there is a lot of criticism out there for the amount of money laid out to banks and other businesses to bail them out, there are also many who feel that it was utterly necessary, albeit a necessary evil, to keep the economy somewhat stabilized and not create a whole new domino effect of layoffs and job losses.